JISC national e-books observatory project – focussed on how students were using ebooks in academic institutions in the UK, working with 120 universities and collecting survey responses from over 52,000 students and academics. The project analysed log data to learn about how users discover and navigate through e-books, explored the attitudes of academics and students and assessed the impact of making course text e-books available via university libraries to thousands of students on print sales.

The project found there was no significant statistical impact on the sales of paper textbooks when the electronic equivalents were made available (free at the point of use) through the university library. The research findings showed a co-existence of print and electronic within the university environment with a continued role for the library.

The challenge of ebooks – a JISC research project with the aim of producing outputs to provide guidance on the challenge of ebooks in academic institutions. These outputs will support institutions in developing their own solutions for exploiting ebooks in teaching, learning and research. The project runs from late 2012 to early 2013.

The outputs will be around three themes: Creation, Curation (acquisition and management) and Consumption.
At time of writing, most of the work available is around Curation, but the project wiki updates regularly.